Jason Droege
CEO, Scale AI. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
executivefounderinvestor@jdroege ↗LinkedIn ↗scale.com ↗
Jason Droege serves as CEO of Scale AI, having previously been its Chief Strategy Officer. He is best known for co-founding the file-sharing service Scour and for founding and scaling Uber Eats from its inception into a global delivery business.
1shows
1appearances
25statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Jason Droege said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Meta paid $14B for a 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI
“The transaction was Meta invested a little bit over fourteen billion dollars to get 49% of the company non-voting stock. Didn't take a new board seat.”
80% of Scale AI's expert labelers hold degrees; 15% have PhDs
“80% of the people that we have in our expert network have a bachelor's degree or grader, which is very contrary to some of the positioning that's out there and some of the understanding of this industry. About 15% have a PhD that's grader.”
Off-the-shelf RAG limitations force enterprises to do internal data labeling
“We're starting to see the labeling move into enterprises and into governments because you can only get so far with off the shelf plus rag, plus some fine tuning based on recorded data.”
Jason Droege: No AI white-collar labor apocalypse in the next two years
“It might happen. The space is moving super fast, but I don't think it's going to happen. Like it's definitely not gonna happen in the next year. The idea that it happens in the next two years, I think is like very far-fetched, but nothing's impossible here.”
AI will force massive organizational change management within two to three years
“We're not there from the technology standpoint, but I do think in the next two to three years, if I, you know, take the bait and like have to make a guess is the technology will get to a point where it will push the change management and policy makers to say l…”
Only 15 Scale AI employees moved to Meta in the $14B deal
“Only about 15 people went over in the transaction. So scale has about 1100 employees or so now, and we have two major businesses.”
Uber Eats launched with 30% take rates before settling at 25%
“And so we came in and we said, we're going to charge you 30% of the bill. And they were like, oh my God, is this Groupon all over again? This is way too high. Oh my gosh. And we explained the economics to them. And they were like, okay, we'll give it a try, bu…”
Incremental restaurant food delivery generates 70% to 80% gross margins
“If you were to take a restaurant location and triple demand based on the same labor, the same ingredients excuse me, the same labor, but you're just scaling ingredients. You've got a 70 to 80% incremental gross margin product.”
Jason Droege rejected a McDonald's delivery partnership for months
“And so McDonald's actually approached us and they said, Hey, we'd love to do food delivery with you. And I'm, and I said, no. And they're like, hold on a second. Like we have like eighty million consumers a day. Like you don't, we don't want to do this togethe…”
Scale AI has two business units each generating hundreds of millions
“Each of those businesses has each of them has hundreds of millions of revenue. So we kind of have two unicorns inside the company today that sustains.”
Scale AI provides data labeling services for the Department of Defense
“We have a relationship with the department of defense where we do labeling for them.”
Training data value scales with its generalizability across tasks and environments
“And the more generalizable it is, the more valuable the data is. So our job is to provide the most valuable data to model builders that accomplishes the goal of making the agents as useful as possible for their end users.”
Mission-critical enterprise accuracy remains extremely difficult for multi-agent systems
“The reality is, is that it's very hard to get mission critical use cases in agentic systems where agents are talking to agents to a level of accuracy that is necessary to accomplish a goal.”
Autonomous vehicles require less data labeling than they did historically
“Autonomous vehicles do not need as much data labeling as they did in the past.”
Scale AI's enterprise and government work primarily consists of model evaluations
“A lot of it's evals and within enterprise customers and government customers, it's mostly evals because somebody has got to establish the benchmark for like what good looks like.”
Moving AI from 70% POC to production is like adding uptime nines
“Basically what happens is the POCs Get to, like, 60 or 70% of the way there, and the human mind goes, oh, the rest is no big deal. But it's kind of like uptime in data centers where, like, every nine is, like, you know, an order of magnitude investment, you kn…”
Automating important enterprise workflows with AI takes six to twelve months
“If you have engineers who've worked with models before and they put in the time and I'm talking about like months, not like minutes, like you see on these videos to actually get legal approval, policy approval, regulatory approval change management, like an ac…”
Uber Eats hit $20 billion in gross bookings within 4.5 years
“Well, we launched it in December of 2015 in Toronto, and within, like, two hours, we had done, like, 20,000 dollars for the sales. It was crazy how quickly we saw that, that it was the right idea and the unit economy for good. And then four and a half years la…”
Uber Eats kept mostly the same management team from $0 to $20B
“That management team for the most part, outside of some of the operations side, but like for the most part, that management team was the same management team from day one, when we had nothing to twenty billion dollars.”
AI tools that animate still photos into video will be emotionally life-changing
“I think those are going to be really like emotionally life-changing for people because you, because just like a little bit of movement in an image from a grandparent or a relative or whatever you haven't seen in a while, it really does make a big emotional imp…”
Scale AI signed two $100 million government contracts in a single month
“100, yeah. We didn't sign just one. We signed two in one month. So yes, no, the, our federal business is doing well.”
MPAA and RIAA sued Scour for $250 billion, settled for $1 million
“Because the MPAA and the RAA were the ones who sued us, the entertainment industry sued us or the associations that represent the entertainment industry, and then they settled it for a million dollars.”
Scale AI has built RL environments for AI agents for over a year
“There's these things called RL environments that effectively are sandboxes for AI agents to play in to accomplish a goal so that they can learn how to accomplish that goal. We've been doing this for over a year.”
Scale AI sells model data and custom enterprise applications
“So we have two sides of our business. One, we supply data to model builders. We sell the data. And then the other is, is we actually do solutions. We do, we sell applications and services to healthcare systems, insurance systems, et cetera.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jason's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | CEO, Scale AI | 1 | 25 | 100% 4/4 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |